Born in Mutare, Zimbabwe and currently a resident of New York City, Chipaumire has been challenging stereotypes of Africa and the black performing body, art, and aesthetic for the past decade. She has studied dance in many parts of the world including Africa (Senegal, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and South Africa), Cuba, Jamaica and the U.S. A graduate of the University of Zimbabwe’s School of Law, Chipaumire holds an M.A. in Dance and M.F.A. in Choreography and Performance from Mills College (CA). Chipaumire is a 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts recipient and 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow, and a two-time New York Dance and Performance (aka “Bessie”) Awardee. Her work has been supported by the MAP Fund, the Jerome Foundation, NYFA B.U.I.L.D., National Dance Project, NYSCA, The Joyce Theater Foundation with support from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Chipaumire has been an adjunct faculty member at Arizona State University-Tempe, Bennington College, the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, and Barnard College.
Tag Archives: presence
Sardono W. Kusumo
Sardono W. Kusumo (Indonesia) is a director/choreographer/filmmaker and lecturer at Jakarta Institute of the Arts. Since the 1970s, not only have the works of Sardono W. Kusumo seen acclaim in his home country, they have been critically received in tours to Asia, Europe and the Americas and at major international festivals. Sardono’s work emerges from the pluralistic multicultural society that is modern Indonesia, informed by his classical Javanese training and his activism (most notably on behalf of Indonesia’s rain forests and the indigenous peoples who inhabit them). Formally trained in classical Javanese dance, Sardono has researched and explored multidisciplinary and intercultural pathways and worked with a diverse group of artists around the globe, whether it is the people in Bali, East Kalimantan and Nias, or contemporary artists such as Peter Brook, Arianne Mnouchkine and Eugenio Barba. His long-standing relationship with the villagers of Teges, Bali, has resulted in remarkable creations such as Dongeng dari Dirah (Sorceress of Dirah) that toured Europe in 1974. A film of the same name, choreographed and directed by Sardono and shot on location in and with the villagers of Teges, was completed in 1992. His environmentally based pieces Meta Ecology (1979), Plastic Jungle (1983) and Hutan yang Merintih (Lamenting Forest) (1987) were the direct result of a relationship he had developed with the Dayak tribesmen of East Kalimantan. He has also created solo pieces for himself with Japanese composers Yuji Takahashi, Kauze Sawai and Takehisa Kosugi which have been seen in Jakarta, Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe. Sardono is a true pioneer. In 1968, he became the youngest member of the Jakarta Arts Council. In the late 1960s, Sardono founded Indonesia’s first experimental group. He has been with the faculty of the Jakarta Institute for the Arts (IKJ) since 1970. A recipient of national and international awards for his contribution to the arts, Sardono continues to travel regularly throughout Indonesia and act on issues of concern to him.
Ricardo Dominguez
Ricardo Dominguez is an artist and associate professor of visual arts at UC San Diego. He has been the subject of controversy over a number of acts of electronic civil disobedience on his own and with the Electronic Disturbance Theater, which he co-founded with Brett Stalbuam, Stefan Wray, and Carmin Karasic.
Electronic Disturbance Theater, has organized “virtual sit-ins” that attempted to disturb websites with a program called FloodNet that automatically requests the target page over and over. These events sometimes incorporated a search term, such that the search would return a phrase like “Transparency not found” in the University of California, Office of the President website, or “human rights not found” at the website of Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo. On one occasion, the US Department of Defense diverted a planned attack to a nonexistent website. The “virtual sit-ins” were done in solidarity with Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico.
In 2007 Dominguez also helped develop a phone app called the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) with artists Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardens, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Merhmand , which uses GPS technology to help immigrants find water stations in the Southern California desert and which also includes a poetry feature. It raises awareness about the number of people who die in the U.S.-Mexico border region and aims to rethink the ways in which “immigrants are always presented as less-than-human and certainly not part of a community which is establishing and inventing new forms of life.” TBT was subject to considerable controversy initiated by three Republican California congressmen; ultimately the University of California stated that TBT did not misuse research funds, but would not comment on whether it had broken any laws.
Currently, Dominguez is a Principal Investigator at CALIT 2, as well as, the Performative Nano-robotics Lab at SME (UCSD), and he is the Lead Researcher of the UCSD Center for Drone Policy and Ethics.